Spring semester is winding down, and the students in my course Rhetoric
of the Environmental Movement are
reading Edward Abbey’s 1968 memoir, Desert
Solitaire. After having duly investigated news reports, scientific
studies, websites, and environmental impact statements, they appreciate Abbey’s
lively and eccentric voice and his vivid descriptions of the landscape of Arches National
Park. As we discuss Abbey’s contribution to environmental
discourse in the U.S, it’s a treat for me, too, to revisit
Cactus Ed each year. I’m always confronted with fresh perspectives and
layers that have eluded me in previous readings.
Like my students, I have
difficulty pinning any particular genre to Desert
Solitaire. It contains, in varying degrees, nature writing,
Montaigne-style essay writing, scathing polemic, satire,
instruction-manual-style directions, travel narrative, and confessional memoir.
Where does Abbey stand on environmental preservation? I ask in class.
At first,
students want to pin him as a liberal, a libertarian, a primitivist, an
anarchist, a romantic, or a radical, and they can find passages that seem to
support all of these contradictory labels. Likewise, passages are dug up that
refute them all. He was a wily, unpredictable dude, both in his writing and his
storied personal life and death, and to underscore this I sometimes share
“Ed anecdotes” with the students, such as that about his secretive burial
in Southern Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta wilderness.
A puzzle piece that’s eluding me this year is Abbey’s views
on environmental justice. You might understandably 
wonder why such a thing
would matter in the larger scheme of things. One reason is that Abbey’s
works, especially Desert Solitaire
and The Monkey Wrench Gang, have
likely reached more people than almost any other written material on
environmental preservation, many of them outside what might be considered a normal
or target audience for such pieces. Both are accessible and somewhat hip and
edgy (the latter especially). Both can also be read as parables against
technology and its effects, especially pollution, the scourge of the land but
also the poor and ill.
So was Abbey a kind of voice of justice? I’m not
sure it’s that easy. In one remarkable passage in Desert Solitaire, Abbey opines that
preservation is not only necessary for the usual reasons of ecological and
spiritual health, but as “a refuge from authoritarian government.”
Sounding eerily like one of my cousins who has watched Red Dawn a few too many times, Abbey lists
what he sees as harbingers of impending totalitarianism: urbanization, population
growth, mechanization of agriculture, military aggression, gun control, and
depletion of wilderness.
If we are to preserve “freedom and
innovation,” he writes, we may need wilderness areas to stage
“guerilla warfare against tyranny.” Such a diatribe does certainly
advocate some sort of justice of a violent and anarchist nature, but what
happens when the sought-after personal liberty is achieved? Will it protect the
very wilderness that nurtured it? Will it safeguard the interests of the
downtrodden?
I’m sure there are plenty of Libertarian folk who will be
happy to school me in this area, but I’m skeptical: our current liberties
haven’t been especially fruitful in these areas. So, I remain torn on
Abbey’s contribution to environmental justice, but I’m going to
keep on reading him — after all, the guy can certainly turn a phrase —
and maybe the students and I can hash something out.
Essays in the A Just West blog are not written by High Country News. The authors are solely responsible for the content.
Dr. Jacqueline Wheeler is the Writing Programs Associate Director at Arizona State University.
Monkey Wrench Gang image courtesy Flickr user earthlightbooks
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